Judero is my beautiful ugly boy. Stay on the topmost layer and you find a traditional hero's journey. Tragedy has befallen the Highlands and Judero’s here to help. Daughter’s gone missing? Judero can fix it. Twins have turned into a conjoined monstrosity? Judero can fix it. He’s the archetypal blue collar strong man. Like Link, Hercules, and Samson before him, his stories can be boiled down to ‘something happened’ and the sequence of events are bizarre enough on their own to keep your attention wholly through the 4 hours or so of playtime. It’s a game with a lot of personal depth that invites questions. What does it all mean?
There's hacking and slashing, monster possession, puzzles, and boss fights remixed across various settings in a familiar fashion, but with enough twist and variety to keep me on my toes from set piece to set piece. I respect simple things done well. Simple is not the same as easy. Sushi is simple, rice and slice, but the cooks who train years to master rice washing before touching a knife will tell you it's far from easy. Judero is more or less like having a college roommate who has a seemingly never ending list of different ways to cook eggs: Huevos Ahogados, Benedict, Omelettes, Scrambled. It's not easy in the slightest and I shudder to think how many eggs the devs put themselves through to get to this level of mastery.
‘Mastery.’ Now there's a word I didn't reflexively associate with Judero when I first laid eyes on it. In video games, it doesn't take much to go wrong with stop motion, clay models, and constructing dioramas in the physical world, then translating them to digital. Stop motion risks being perceived as a jittery unoptimized mess. And transferring between media tends to take some of the life out of the inanimate objects. The devs went loud to solve this problem. Makes sense. Assume you lose 50% of the clay's essence when moving it over to digital, then making it 500% more intense from the start will avoid dulling your models. It's highly stylized, crass, and that applies to EVERYTHING. All the characters, locations, cut scenes, and HUD are fashioned from items you'd expect to find in a child’s craft room, and it was the player model’s uncanny doll figurine that unpacked a long hidden memory of Action League Now —and this is their production of Angus in Wonderland.
It’s a triple bean dip of meta weirdness. On the first layer is my general understanding of being a normal(ish) human. On the second layer are the general abnormalities within Judero that I find strange but are normal to the NPCs. Then there’s the third layer, trouble in Wonderland, where things have gone strange for the locals, but I can’t tell the difference between what’s only strange to me and what’s doubly strange for the both of us. Curiouser and curiouser. And the cast of Judero have a rather Cheshire disposition about them. Their soporific musings and Scottish brogue are entrancing. Whether it be contemplating life, death, or the inbetweens, every word takes the scenic route. Why say ‘she cried’ when you can say ‘the color of the carpet darkened under her sunken head’ or something in that general direction? I’ve described myself as a caveman gamer. No need for dialogue. Just meat. But I did not skip speaking with a single NPC whenever I passed through a small town. Do I understand what was said? Not really, and it was a grand time nevertheless.
That’s what keeps my mind on Judero weeks after I finished playing. Physically, I am here in front of a keyboard, but mentally I return to the rolling clay hills of Judero and think what the hell was that bit with the monkey and the raft all about? Confusion. No. Bewonderment. It’s the kind of befuddling that I don’t often get from video games because there is great fear that to confuse the audience is to lose the audience. Crude wisdom is what's on offer here. The kind you find in myths, bibles, and Lewis Carrol novels. Be wary of strange colored rabbits. Buy the throw ability before the stripper pole ability even though the latter looks more fun. And haggis can be lethal under the right conditions.
Pros
Handcrafted, organic farm-to-plate visuals.
Beautiful music.
Bewitching dialogue.
Tight pacing.
Old-school feel.
Extra lore exploration.
Cons
Controls felt a little stiff.
Could do with a smidgen more player direction.
Eye of the Beholder
Short to play and complete. It’s great for a one-and-done Sunday playthrough for people like me who have no shortage of things to play and want a hidden oddity to shake a bit of life back into their routine. People who prefer more bang for buck with their purchases may not be as satisfied with the playtime and minimal replayability.
Big E ‘Experience’. I think it’s a bit of a cop out to say a game is ‘not a game, but an experience.’ Usually it’s applied to games that don’t have much game to them and rely heavily on the production value. It’s a game. But it’s also an experience. The base of the game is pretty well alright, but it’s the entire production that brings it together.
A little obtuse, but I tend to prefer ‘lore’ over ‘narrative’, so do with that what you will. There is no VaatiVidya here to help explain things.
Playtime: 4 hours
Score: 8/10
Base Price: $17.99
Platform: PC, Mac, Linux, Switch
Disclosure:
Review copy was provided by the publisher
def going on the list! excellent writing very well done. Got me super intrigued
Welcome to Substack! Thank you for the enjoyable review. I’m now that much closer to getting through my stomach flutters upon seeing the Judero trailer and maybe buying the game. 😃